


Au Cœur, Une Plaie Ouverte

by moon_custafer



Category: Sapphire and Steel
Genre: Gen, Songfic sort-of, Yuletide 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:42:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27566206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon_custafer/pseuds/moon_custafer
Summary: The botanical survey of an old-growth beech forest goes dead quiet.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Au Cœur, Une Plaie Ouverte

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nonesane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nonesane/gifts).



“So, this trip out to the woods—”

“Not just any woods—this is some of the last old-growth forest in Europe. And recent digs around the dolmen have turned up buried wood, food offerings— samples we can compare against the modern-day species to see which are native and which have been introduced.”

“Does it ever make you uncomfortable? Distinguishing between “native” and “invasive” species? Some would include us in the latter.”

“This is why I went into forestry instead of political science like you.” Bochra takes a sip of her coffee, buying time to properly answer her sister’s question. “One could argue,” she begins, “that in nature _all_ humans are the invasive species, no matter where our parents or grandparents came from or how long ago. I prefer to think of us as the only species that makes the conscious choice to live in harmony with our environment, instead of acting on instinct until our actions undercut us and famine or disease knock our population back down again.” Glancing around their neighbourhood cafe with its tiled counter, its neat, lime-green walls, she adds: “Besides, our research has more often than not shown that species everybody considers typical of the region... weren’t always.”

* * *

Guy’s been assigned the job of driver for their “little expedition,” and he picks Bochra up from her apartment at six o’clock, with Jeanne already in the front passenger seat. The department has, for once, provided a van with enough storage for all the surveying equipment, leaving the rear passenger seats free for Bochra and their doctoral advisor Rachel; there’s even room for everyone’s backpacks and water bottles. Though all the team have headphones (Guy) or earbuds (everyone else), it’s become their ritual to listen to each others’ playlists in turn on the van’s speakers as they drive to the site. Bochra’s is mostly hip-hop, some pop music. Guy’s is vintage jazz and Jeanne’s electronica; Rachel favours old 1980s rock.

The sky is already a fierce deep blue when they come to the end of the road. Guy parks the car and they unload to head into the woods, but first Jeanne hands around the sunscreen and mosquito repellent:

“The bug-spray’s more necessary in there than the sunblock,” she says, “but why take chances?” Bochra nods, already glad to be in sportswear made of a moisture-wicking fibre. The heat is cloying, even under the deep shade of the forest canopy; the verticals of the widely-spaced beech trunks dazzle the botanists as they hike, and Bochra begins to feel lost in a maze of dark columns beneath a green sky. Guy, meanwhile, scrabbles happily among the forest’s wide-spreading roots. He scrapes up a sample of the soil, sniffs at it.

“What does our resident truffle-pig detect?” Jeanne asks. Guy holds out the vial — the sample has a slightly stronger version of the earthy scent which, along with that of leaves and moss, pervades the area.

“Mycelium. Probably some interesting bacteria too."

The team walks further. The ground swells a little just before they reach the dolmen, so that the massive rocky shape seems to rise up suddenly from the moss and litter of the forest floor. It's a dramatic sight: the great stones crouching in this hollow of ancient greenery, waiting for... what? Or whom?

Bochra takes out her earbuds; without musical accompaniment the tension dissipates. It’s a prehistoric monument, yes, but they’ve already seen the important parts-- the ancient wood fragments and buried food offerings-- back at the university. As a ruin, the structure is romantic, but its surface has been overwritten by time; her team’s job is to compare the modern plants around it with the fragments collected by the archeologists.

Jeanne runs her fingers over one of the entrance stones:

“Lots of lichens. These might well have colonized the rock not long after it was rolled into place.” Guy, as always, joins her in examining the spot, and Bochra and Rachel exchange glances: _Who do those two think they’re fooling?_ their smiles ask each other.

“LeDentu's sketches don’t show lichen growth this extensive. Can it have spread this much since 1928?”

“LeDentu was a crank and a nationalist looking for evidence that this dolmen was the origin of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy-tale so he could claim both for France; you can take anything he said or drew with a grain of salt the size of the Louvre.”

Jeanne and Guy’s argument/courtship-dance continues, and Bochra determinedly puts her earbuds back in, takes up one of the tape measures, and begins pacing away from the site. Rachel is still assembling her equipment, but will no doubt do the same.

* * *

Bochra looks up from the stake she’s just planted, rubs the back of her neck and takes out her earbuds. As she rises, the dolmen slides into view again. The tripod Rachel had been unfolding stands in front of it, but there’s no sign of the team. _That’s odd_ , Bochra thinks. She's about to call to her companions when she sees the bird.

It’s a woodpecker, clinging to the trunk of a nearby beech and generally going about its day, tapping at the bark in the endless search for food. But not the faintest sound reaches her. She touches her ears, then her pockets, in case she’s forgotten to take out the buds. As she does so a dragonfly dips, passing within arm’s reach of her with no hum from its glassy wings. Bochra squints up at the tree boughs. They sway gently, but without — it’s like the landscape around her is a video with the sound off. She draws a sharp gasp, and the realization that she can hear _herself_ only make matters worse; sudden total deafness would have been alarming, but this—

“Spooky, no?” 

The booming voice comes from a tall, stout man in some kind of dark clothing, a little ways away. Bochra starts. Like her, he seems exempt from the deadly silence, but she hadn’t heard him approach. The man smiles: 

“Take a step forward.” While normally she might question the wisdom of following the instructions of a strange man while alone in the woods, one step will still leave a safe distance between them, so Bochra shrugs and complies.

All the sounds of the forest— well, they don’t rush in on her ears, exactly. They’re just unobtrusively, undeniably, there again. She blinks.

“Was I standing in a dead spot? Some sort of natural acoustic effect? How was I still able to hear you and nothing else around here?”

“I’ve got a big voice!” the man laughs, his neatly-trimmed beard splitting in a grin. "And there’s nothing natural about that dead spot," he adds, suddenly sober. "That’s what I'm here to fix.”

“And you are--?”

“Lead. Just Lead. Like the plumb bob in your theodolites.” He points to the survey device Rachel set up.

“We use lasers for that now.”

“Do you?” Lead chuckles again. With his impressive height and breadth he ought to overheat from sheer volume, even without the turtleneck sweater and black leather vest that have to be the least appropriate gear possible for the summer weather. Perhaps he’s the type who cheerfully endures all for his devotion to biker chic. Perhaps it takes more heat than this to affect him. She realizes he’s given a name, of sorts—

“Bochra. Botany student, not surveyor. Since you noted the theodolite. Can you tell me what’s become of my colleagues?”

”They’re still... here. We’ll do our best to get them back.”

”We?”

“Called on some help, once I realized there were—” For a moment Bochra could swear he’s about to say _humans._ “People involved. I have a tendency to drive’em a bit mad.” He smiles as he says this, but his eyes are grave. “Though I’m nothing so dangerous as the transuranics. I have to hold _them_ in, you know.”

"No, I don't know.”

“I realize you’ve no way of knowing I’m not the Big Bad Wolf.”

“I’d say more a bear than a wolf.” At this comment, Lead throws back his head and laughs.

”Your friend’s very perceptive,” says a woman’s voice, and they both turn to look. How busy this spot is today; and it must be the moss that deadens everyone’s footsteps.

The blonde woman wears a long blue dress Bochra might have coveted if it weren’t so thoroughly inappropriate for the locale; as it is, she wonders if the newcomer isn’t one of those neo-pagans come out to the dolmen to do some kind of ceremony, though at least her outfit isn’t embarrassingly faux-medieval. The man in the grey suit is blond too, with a severe expression, and the sight of him gives her a qualm until Lead steps forward and greets the pair with obvious affection. Not neo-Nazis, anyway. She’d recalled Guy’s tales of having been harassed on a couple of Bronze-age sites. The man in the suit still looks grumpy, but now Bochra suspects, watching his movements, that this is his normal manner and reflects no particular enmity. The woman in blue, for her part, smiles and embraces Lead, but there’s a hint of worry as she glances in the botanist’s direction.

“Bochra,” Lead says, “may I present Goldilocks, I mean Sapphire? And I guess that makes you Baby Bear, Steel.” He grins at the man in the grey suit, who without moving a muscle in his face somehow deepens his unamused look.

“Lead,” he grumbles, “do be serious.”

* * *

...“and you’re _certain_ it’s not the dolmen?”

“Not the dolmen. Not the forest. They’re both old, but they’re stable. It’s something else, some kind of…” Lead casts about for the right term—“Grit in the oyster, that it hasn’t yet become pearls. Sapphire, can you check this spot for artifacts from the last couple centuries?” He frowns and looked about the forest. “Anything to do with sound, especially-- given the silence that’s fallen over this place.”

Sapphire kneels in the moss and leaf litter, her dress pooling around her feet. She touches the ground and for a moment Bochra thinks she sees the woman’s blue eyes grow still bluer and glow like twin electronic screens.

“Ten metres from this spot,” and there’s something mechanical in Sapphire’s voice, “and twenty-seven centimetres below the soil, entangled in the tree roots, is a military fife, era of Napoleon III. It has been there for one hundred and fifty years, eight months, five days, three hours and fifty-six minutes.” She pats a dry brown leaf: “Right here, a laser compact disc is buried approximately nine centimetres below the soil. _It_ has been there for sixteen years, three months, two days, twelve hours and four minutes.”

“Perhaps it’s Silver you ought to have called in on this job, Lead,” Steel interjects. Lead and Sapphire both shake their heads:

“It’s a not the artifacts. It’s a tune that was played on them.”

Some part of Bochra’s brain must be following the thread of this mad conversation, for she asks:

“Are any of the songs on the disc from the same era as the fife?” Her voice sounds unnaturally loud in her own ears, the more so as the three… whoever, whatever-they-are... all turn to look at her as though they’d forgotten her presence till that moment. Lead, however, smiles:

“Well, Sapphire? Any old tunes on the disc?”

Sapphire, still kneeling in the grass (Bochra would be concerned for her dress if she didn’t suspect it to be as immune to the elements as everything else about these visitors), touches the ground again, and her eyes flicker:

“One,” she says. “ _Le Temps Des Cerises_ , composed by Antoine Renard in 1868.” Lead whistles:

“That one’s got some heavy baggage. No wonder the two have been calling to each other across one-hundred-thirty-five years.”

“In translation, please? And what’s this got to do with Guy and Rachel?”

“The tune has been heard on this spot at least twice over the centuries. The twin events are like a thumb and forefinger pinching a fold in time, and your friends are caught in it. You may be too, if we’re not careful.”

“Must be one hell of a tune,” says Steel with a small grim smile. “Your friends weren’t singing it, were they?”

“Rachel sings along with the music on her headphones sometimes, but she’s more the rock’n’roll type. Earlier today it was Talking Heads.”

Lead stoops over her:

“Can you sing what she was singing?” Bochra opens her mouth and Lead holds up one of his massive hands for silence. “Wait a bit. Would you let me hold you, while you sing it? Otherwise you mightn’t be safe.”

“You just told me you’re not safe for humans.”

“Less than a minute shouldn’t do you any harm-- less harm than singing in this place without insulation.”

 _Sure. Why not. It’s not like this day can get any stranger._ Bochra nods, then takes a step forward into Lead’s arms. He’s as warm as she expected, but something about his embrace feels odd. _No heartbeat_ , she realizes; and hers, for a moment, speeds up in panic. She looks up into his face and finds it kind and sad:

“It’s all right. Just hum the tune you remember Rachel singing.”

_"Years ago, I was an angry young man…. Now I pretend… that I was a billboard._

_Standing tall by the side of the road… I fell in love with the beautiful highway..."_

As Bochra sings, her voice small and nervous, the air begins to shimmer with more than just the summer heat. She can see Sapphire and Steel’s figures waver and for a moment, they aren’t human-shaped at all. She closes her eyes— she doesn’t wan’t to see Lead do the same, not while he’s holding her.

“Bochra, Bochra, you can stop now.” She does. “You can open your eyes, too.” Lead’s holding her at arm’s length now, gently pushing her away as Sapphire lays a cool hand on her shoulder. “Same musical key,” Lead says. “That’s what pulled’em into the crease in Time.”

* * *

“You said yourself, the dolmen is stable.” Steel paces back and forth in front of the monument. “We could use the weight of it to simply flatten out the crease.”

“Like a lawn roller, you mean?” Lead chuckled, then glances at Sapphire. Bochra watches the wordless look between the two. She clears her throat:

“What would that mean for my colleagues?” In reply, Steel gives only an exasperated sigh. “I take it they’d be flattened too, then?”

“Like flowers between the pages of a book,” Sapphire answers.

Lead cocks his head to one side:

“Spreading the pressure across a few more points in time might do the trick.”

“Do you intend to sing?” Steel asks suspiciously.

“You know I can, but I could use some help. Sapphire, can you take back enough time to talk to the people caught in the crease? Put Bochra on the line to explain things if you have to.”

“What exactly am I going to tell them? ‘Don’t panic, and sing _Le Temps Des Cerises_?’”

“It _could_ work,” Sapphire says, hope in her voice for the first time. She joins Lead who still has his arms around Bochra. She looms over the young botanist in a way that’s almost terrifying and then very, very gently takes her chin in her hand and tilts her face upwards and for a moment it’s still terrifying and also thrilling because Bochra thinks Sapphire might be about to kiss her but her eyes light up that electronic-screen blue again, hot like the sky above the forest canopy, and suddenly Sapphire is inside her head, and they’re both in Guy’s head and also Jeanne’s and Rachel’s.

Bochra’s colleagues can’t move, and they’re frightened, but they can hear her and she them:

“It’s all right. I mean, I think it’s going to be all right. Eventually. Probably. I realize you’re already have a bizarre day, but… we need you to sing.”

Before they can ask her what she means, Lead begins to hum, so softly that at first she only feels it, a bass rumble from his chest. When Sapphire joins in, so does Bochra, stumbling at first over the old song’s words:

_"…le temps des cerises, le gai rossignol, le merle moqueur…"_

And finally Steel, a little unhappy about it and one-sixteenth of a tone flat, is singing as well. The others, caught up in some other time, are singing too—Bochra can hear them in her mind.

The shimmer starts up again, but she’s ready for it now, and Lead’s holding her again. And Bochra’s studied the papers on carbon-exchange through tree roots, but there’s a difference between understanding ecology and actually _perceiving_ how the trees around them are shafts through time, linking one year to another; and how even the trees shift and sway by comparison with the lichens that sweep over the stones of the dolmen; and the mushrooms, oh, the mushrooms—

* * *

“She’s coming round.” Bochra opens her eyes just as Guy’s face appears behind Jeanne’s shoulder. She sits up, feeling as though every part of her body has shifted one centimetre to the left, and sees Rachel bracing herself against the dolmen.

”What happened?”

Guy is scrolling through something on his phone:

“I tried to film, but I expect it’ll just turn out to be static or something— what?!” Bochra snatches at the phone as she recognizes the tune. 

“Sorry, I wasn’t sure it wasn’t going to start all over again.” She looks around as their voices play back, thin-sounding in the recording, but the air only bears the shimmer of a hot day, and she hands the device to Guy, who squints at the screen:

“The weirdest thing,” he mutters. “We were looking for you, and then we were just trying to move at all, and then we were singing for some reason.”

“Where are Lead and the others?”

“No, it can’t be any sort of toxin,” Jeanne says, and it takes Bochra a moment to realize Jeanne thinks she’s answering her question about Lead. “We didn’t consume anything on-site. I’d suggest we go into town and have a doctor check us for sunstroke, but I’m not sure any of us are safe to drive.”

“Take some rest,” says Bochra. “There’s something I need to do.”

The battered CD is there, of course, nine centimetres down from where Sapphire touched the ground. Bochra sits back on her heels and looks at it, glinting. She’s not sure if it’s safe to touch, and after a moment she pushes the soil back over the artifact.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually did do a bit of reading on geography, archeology and forests, and then I mostly ended up just hand waxing everything. LeDentu and his theories were completely made up by me.


End file.
